


When Day Breaks

by mournfulmournful



Series: The Proposals [1]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: AU, Angst, Basically Just What Elena And Elijah After When Day Breaks Activates, It's OK There Is No Real Canon, Liberal Reworking of SCP Lore, Literally everyone - Freeform, SCP AU, When Day Breaks, everyone dies, seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-20
Updated: 2021-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-29 00:13:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30147756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mournfulmournful/pseuds/mournfulmournful
Summary: Elena and Elijah, when day breaks. A.K.A the first in a series of very angsty AU's based on Elejah in the aftermath of various SCP-001 proposals.
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Elijah Mikaelson
Series: The Proposals [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2218905
Kudos: 1





	When Day Breaks

**Author's Note:**

> **So. For the purpose of this fic all you need to know is that a. A lot happened while I was gone, b. One of those things was me becoming obsessed with SCP's, and c. Me being me I _immediately_ decided to make a series where various SCP 001's do their thing and Elejah has to deal with it. Today's episode of why would you ever do this is my personal favorite SCP-001 proposal - S.D Locke's _When Day Breaks!_ **
> 
> **In my personal SCP canon(because let's be honest, everyone has one), everyone affected by this SCP dies/becomes inactive during the night. Mainly because I wrote this before I remembered that that probably wouldn't happen. Also, if it isn't a person, _When Day Breaks_ lights it on fire. I know that isn't canon either, but trust me - I needed it for The Angst.**

She crushes black stones, beneath the soles of her feet, and the air around her slightness shimmers; stale and burnt and in ruin. She counts off their names, in her head, and wonders - though there will be forever for that, even if she does not yet know it - who they _were,_ to her, in the end. And the soles of her shoes wore out months ago; the stones cut through them like glass, dig into her feet and bite them. The city still sounds on fire; the grit gets between her toes. As she cuts past the charred foundations of the Grill, she finds herself on her knees; she has never felt more raw, more keening, than the howl that’s ripped from her throat, and she wonders if this is how werewolves feel, when the moon peeks silver into the blue dark, cracking their skulls in their skin; if it is how _they_ felt, screaming at her to run, or if this utter, writhing _agony_ is hers, alone, to hold.

“Elena,” She hears - from the shadows, or what had once made them, yesterday, when there was light. She hears him faintly, as if from very far away, the numbness and the weight of it all cold enough water to drown in; the soft thud of his footfalls on the razed ground, the rustle of the raking wind on the suit jacket she knows, somehow, will be missing. He is not quiet, she thinks to herself. Not with her. Not anymore. And she feels his gaze staring through the notches of her convulsing spine, straight into all of her broken, the shock and the fear of it masked, just barely, by habit, burying them with a wild and desperate concern. She says nothing to him, can say nothing, but it makes him, somehow, no less near.

“Elena,” He says, again, into the clawing darkness of night, “You need to get inside soon.”

She twists the ring in her pocket, feeling the gold in her teeth, sweet and rotten as sugar, and remembers the way that it used to gleam in the neon lights of the _Grill,_ blood-crimson tinged with gold.

“I can’t,” She tells him. “ _Fuck,_ Elijah, I _can’t._ ”

She hears him, behind her, run his hands through his hair; it’s grown, since the last time she’s seen it, she is suddenly sure, and she wonders what he _really_ looks like. How good he is, now, after everything, at _really_ hiding what he feels. She could turn and ask him; it would only be a few inches, and he would be with her again, but a voice in her head sends a shiver ripping through her, and she _knows._ She could get through it, if Elijah was with her, and even now, when nobody could ever know save for him, she won’t let herself be a liar. _I keep my word, lovely Elena,_ she remembers him saying - and thinks, as his hand lands steady and sure on her bony shoulder and she _wrenches_ away from him, that he might just be the only one who could ever understand.

“The sun will be up, tomorrow,” He tells her.

“Do you think?” Asks Elena. She feels the moment he catches it all - _Do you really think, after_ this, _that anything will be the same?_

“I cannot allow you to do this,” He tells her, as firm as she has ever heard him, which means, she knows, that he is nowhere near certain at all. She wonders if part of him wants it, too, has always wanted just this - to sit on the ground, stained in someone else’s blood, and watch himself crumble to dust as the sun rises orange and pink.

“Who told you it was your decision?”

She wishes, just for a moment, that she were looking at him. Seeing him, one last time, as _Elijah,_ crouched with her in the ashes that she had once called her home, lithe and fatal and achingly, truly _himself,_ tasting her name on his tongue like it’s still the first time they’ve met.

“You said,” She starts, and the words come bleeding and scratched, “You told me, once, that you would let me decide.”

“No,” He says, “Not about this.”

“I’m sorry,” She lets herself tell him; lets it slip out of her, like slipping through cold, open water in the face of her mother’s corpse; like slipping through Klaus’s fingers, again and again and again; like slipping on December ice and feeling her wrist-bones shatter, when she tries blocking the fall. “Elijah,” She tells him-

“I know.”

“Then stay with me,” Says Elena, feeling the words selfish in her. It doesn’t feel bad, she thinks; not the way that it should. And the thought rises in her unbidden - _What does it mean to be selfish, if nobody else can get hurt?_ The whisper is savage, and it hurts just like being turned hurt, so she pushes his hand off her shoulder.

“What do you want?” Asks Elijah; his hand is back, like it was never gone, and maybe, just _maybe,_ it never was. His breath is hot like August rain, and his there-ness, with her in the blue dark, means everything to her, again.

“I want to forget,” Says Elena.

“If I let you ,” He asks -

And it is her turn, now.

“I know.”

“Did I ever tell you why I wrote it?” His voice is carefully concealed, and she feels the threat of it rip at her like he once ripped at her neck, tearing her vervain off and tossing it to the side like she was _nothing_ to him. He breaths like a man who is tired, and takes her silence as the answer that she cannot give. “I wrote it,” He tells her, “Because it is true. You are a rare kind of human.”

“Was,” She tells him, and twists at the ring again. It has a sharp edge at the setting, and she tries to find it without looking, to get it at her exposed skin and press against it ’til it cuts. Yearns for the smell of blood in her nostrils, the red of it on her teeth. When he pulls her into his body, she lets him, and finds herself too close for comfort, wary and stiff in his hold.

“Promise me something?” She asks him, as her tensed-to-run muscles unfurl, as the minutes tick by far too slowly, as she picks faces out of her memory to try and assign to the corpses; as Elijah catches a strand of her dark hair and tucks it behind her ear, as the scent of his quiet grows loud, “When it’s over,” She tells him, “When it’s over, I want you to leave.”

And she slips her hand out of her pocket, feels the air hit it cold. It reminds her of being a child again, when the thought of fangs on a summer evening had been as distant as thunder, and her mother made pancakes on Sunday, and Jeremy played Little League and had never heard about love. Feels his own, warm on hers; the linen of his shirt-sleeve torn. _There are no corpses,_ she tells herself, _There will only ever be the sun._ But there is this, too - the last hours before the dawn, when the dying world has fallen silent, where she sat yesterday in the Boarding House as Klaus threw the pebble that shattered the window with his last, melting action, letting the sunlight spill in. There is the touch of him, warm, the most hers he ever could have been. The anguished, fleeting knowing of what they might, once, have been.

“Where were you?” She asks, “When the sun rose?”

“Hush,” He tells her - and she _knows,_ then, what it was all supposed to mean, when they said that it felt like a knife in your gut, like a torturer’s wide, devoid laugh. But all she hears is that one _Hush,_ that last scream, that last time she thought she loved Damon.

“I give you my word,” Elijah tells her, and they sit, and they wait for the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> Yep I'm trash thanks for reading


End file.
